When Barack Obama was inaugurated in January 2009, most Americans saw him as a president committed to bringing significant change. But his progressive ambitions soon ran up against indifference and even hostility in the electorate and in some of the political class. How could such an intelligent president find it so hard to get his message across?
Is there still room for hope at the White House?
Historian James Kloppenberg suggests that Obama deserves a place in the pantheon of American political thinkers. The president’s taste for reconciliation and overcoming of partisanship supposedly stems from his original interpretation of American communitarianism and pragmatism. However, viewing Obama solely as a philosopher comes down to overlooking the man of power he is.
According to its conservative rivals, J Street threatens the unity of the Jewish community and discredits the positions of the Israeli government. For liberal Jews, it represents an opportunity to be heard in Washington. Portrait of a lobby that claims the right to criticize Israel.
At a time when a supposedly “post-racial” America is becoming increasingly polarized over its first black president, historian Thomas Sugrue proposes a badly needed perspective on Obama’s attempts to negotiate between color blindness and race consciousness. Despite the depth of his historical perspective, he understates how destructive Obama’s religious moralism is for the cause of racial progress.
It was no accident that Barack Obama chose Ghana for his first presidential trip to Africa: for him, it was a way of paying homage to his illustrious predecessors while officially proclaiming an end to black America’s longstanding fantasy of a return to the native country.
The American presidential election was won by a woman: Stanley Ann Dunham. Born in 1942, she died of cancer in 1995, shortly after turning 52, and thus without having seen her visionary dream realized: the election of her son, Barack Hussein Obama, as 44th President of the United States.
Two months after taking office, is it possible to outline some elements of Obama’s future policy? Dick Howard examines the new political conditions brought about by his election. Obama has rehabilitated the idea of government, but it remains to be seen how he will use his strong political credibility to cope with dramatic domestic and foreign challenges.
How is it possible to talk about the ravages of AIDS on the Black population of the United States without leaving oneself open to being viewed as racist, moralizing or simply communitarian? Barack Obama says he is determined to engage the United States in the fight against this worldwide plague but has a hard time talking about AIDS as an American evil and even less so as an African-American one.
